Context
Smoking, alcohol misuse, poor diet and lack of exercise – these four behaviours and the illnesses they cause are estimated to cost the NHS in England more than £6 billion a year. This is a huge financial burden, and one that can’t be sustained.
The NHS is changing. Lord Darzi’s 2008 NHS Next Stage Review called for as much focus on promoting good health as on treating illness and managing disease. In tandem with this approach, government health policy is now putting much more emphasis on people’s own responsibility, as individuals and as families, to choose healthier behaviours and lifestyles.
To make this policy a reality, the NHS has to find cost-effective ways of tackling these four behaviours. The key is to find out what interventions work with different groups of people, helping them to change their behaviour in both the short and the longer term.
The government has made it clear that it expects primary care trusts (PCTs), in their role as commissioners of local health services, to take the lead in encouraging people to change their behaviour to improve their health. To do this, PCTs need good-quality evidence on the impact and cost-effectiveness of behaviour change interventions so that they can be confident of commissioning services that are proved to bring results. There is currently little systematic evidence available about which kinds of programmes work best with different groups of people.
The Kicking Bad Habits project was launched to identify effective interventions that the NHS could use to support people to choose healthier behaviours.
